MINISTER FOR Agriculture Mary Coughlan's "fatalistic" approach to a deal being struck at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was attacked in the Dáil yesterday.
President of the Irish Farmers' Association Pádraig Walshe told the joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture that the Minister and her officials should accept that no agreement would be better than a bad deal. Instead, her approach was that there would be a deal, sooner or later.
Mr Walshe said he welcomed the Minister's statement on the WTO to the Dáil last week in which she condemned the concessionary approach of EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson, as well as her statement that agriculture should not be sacrificed for the sake of a deal. "In her speech the Minister failed to put on record the devastating cost of the deal if Mandelson gets [ his] way," said Mr Walshe.
He said the result would be that Europe would be flooded with beef from South American ranches, produced by labourers on subsistence wages.
"Produced with lower costs, lower standards, and on enormous ranch-scale units, dairy products, lamb, pork and chicken will be shipped to the EU from all over the world," he said.
He said this would destroy the European model of agriculture based on the family farm structure while corporate ranchers, international traders and shippers, and international supermarket chains would make huge profits. Consumers would later pay the price they set for food.
"The Minister was silent on the facts that Ireland's livestock industry would be decimated with [ the] cattle price falling to €2 per kg, 100,000 cattle farmers redundant and one million suckler cows slaughtered," he said.
He added that if the deal was allowed to happen, milk prices would fall to a low of 24 cent per litre, and there would be serious losses in the sheep, pigs, poultry and grain sectors, with a total loss of €4 billion to the economy.
"I am not presenting these figures to embarrass the Minister, I am presenting them to remind her and the Taoiseach that this is the case they must make in Europe, and there is no doubt about the gravity of the situation," he said.